The Center for the Advanced Study of India with the Department of South Asia Studies, the South Asia Center and the Center for Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania will hold a major conference on critical issues relating to Dalit Studies December 3-5, 2008 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. This will be the most significant conference on Dalit Studies to be held in an academic institution in the United States and we are pleased that the University of Pennsylvania has taken a lead on this front.

We plan to bring together academics and intellectuals from both within and outside of formal academic institutions, including the many organic intellectuals who have kept alive India’s Dalit movement by following Dr. Ambedkar’s injunction to “educate, organize, and agitate.” The purpose of the conference will be to evaluate strategies for ensuring that Dalit agendas are recognized by and incorporated into mainstream academic dialogue and to assess the various political and social agendas, both contemporary and historical, that have sought to improve the lives of Dalits. These include Dalit political formations; print media and literary movements; colonial and postcolonial governmental practices and policies; initiatives for social and economic empowerment; feminist struggles; critiques of nationalist and radical movements; and diasporic activism. The conference will result in the production of an edited volume that will bring various Dalit agendas into dialogue and examine the conditions and contradictions of Dalit social mobility in contemporary India.

The University of Pennsylvania has been at the forefront of area studies since 1942 when Prof. W. Norman Brown pioneered the study of modern India fifteen years before area studies began appearing at other US colleges and universities. This legacy strongly continues at the School of Arts and Sciences through the work of the Department of South Asian Studies, the mission of the South Asia Center, and the superior holdings of the South Asian Studies Collection at Penn’s Van Pelt Library. The Center for the Advanced Study of India, founded in 1992 by political scientist, Prof. Francine Frankel, further expands Penn’s scholarly leadership on South Asian studies with its focus on contemporary India. In 2006, Prof. Devesh Kapur became the new director. Today, the Center for the Advanced Study of India is recognized as a national resource and the sole research institution in the US dedicated to the study of contemporary India, addressing the urgent need for objective knowledge of India’s rapidly changing society, politics and economy, and the processes of transformation underway in an ancient civilization emerging as a major power.